How to Unlock a Device Locked Using Find my Device in the Microsoft Account

There is only one right answer on this forum and the answer above is it.

My issue stemmed from using Microsoft find my phone and I locked my surface pro w/ windows 11. These steps can be a pain but they do work.

Couple key notes that may only pertain to my device.

1. Make sure when you load hive, you are in the C directory.
2. Don’t forget to click sign in options and use the password you normally would use for logging into your device managed Microsoft account.. kinda like the one you used to lock the device in the first place.

Help, at the step 5, after I click 'ok' on the keyname after entering 1234, it gives me an error Cannot load x:\windows\system32\config\software:the process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.

Any idea what went wrong?

How did you reinstall windows. I'm having this same problem and it's not working for me either. My computer is still locked even after I rebooted it

Just following up in case anyone encounters the issue again, I was unable to login to my computer after accidentally locking my own desktop as I thought I was locking a suspicious device, I canceled the locking process (thought i did) but a day after I did so the computer was locked with the message I wrote when locking it, when logging in it said, administrator access is required to log in, but I am the administrator of my computer, I changed the sign in option to password instead of my 4 digit pin and it worked and let me in, I had to reset my pin afterwards for it to work again but it did work and I didn't have to reinstall, you need to use your windows password not windows hello/pin

I'm not sure, my apologies. Maybe I should preface the solution with it working on Windows 11. Looks like you are using an older version, 7 perhaps? I wouldn't expect that to make or break the solution, but I'm also not an expert.